This invention relates to chairs. It relates particularly to office type chairs having a padded and upholstered chair seat and a separate, but connected, padded and upholstered chair back, and a mechanism that allows the user to angularly adjust the chair back relative to the chair seat.
Many prior office chairs were designed for aesthetic appearance rather than user comfort. In today's office environment that uses computers, word processors and other similar equipment, great emphasis is needed in the design of office furniture for the comfort of the user. Office chairs need to take into account a number of comfort features, such as the general lumbar curve of the user, release of pressure points around the body of the user, the ability of the chair to accommodate movements of the user and the ease of the user to adjust the chair to maximize comfort.
One important feature of an office chair that greatly assists in providing comfort to the user is the ability to adjust the angular position of the chair back support relative to the chair seat.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,029,940 to Golynsky et al., assigned to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, as well as the assignee of the present invention, and the prior patents discussed therein describe prior art examples of office chairs that permit backward tilting of a chair seat and a chair back, either together, separately or together, but at differing rates. However, many of these prior office chair designs required many separate parts, were expensive to construct and often just allowed for the tilting of the chair seat and chair back together without the ability of the user to quickly and easily adjust the angular relationship of the seat back relative to the chair seat.